Why poor telecom service will continue, by MTN

Drop calls and general poor reception on mobile telephone will continue for a while, MTN Nigeria, the nation’s biggest telecom company said yesterday.

The MTN said its ambitious expansion work – for which the substantial part of its $1.3billion capital expenditure for this year has gone into – has been stalled by the massive flooding and general insecurity in the country.

MTN Corporate Service officials Akinwale Goodluck and Funmi Omogbenigun yesterday appealed for understanding from its subscribers.

They described the network modernisation and swap-out exercise being carried out as important so as to replace obsolete equipment with modern ones.

The MTN has the largest customer here in Nigeria with 43 million subscribers.

Goodluck said: “We regret, however, that the pace of work has been considerably challenged by the spate of insecurity coupled with the unprecedented flooding being experienced in many parts of the country,” he said.

He added that the network optimisation programme will affect over 4,000 base stations out of its over 10, 000 across the country.

According to Goodluck, ‘The task that we are undertaking is tantamount to building a new network .We are seeking to replicate what we achieved over a six-year period in nine months,” he said, lamenting that in several communities, the base transmission stations (BTS) of the firm were submerged, a development that will inevitably affect service qaulity in the affected areas as subscribers across the network will find making and receiving calls difficult.

“Several swap-outs have reached very advanced stages of completion. The entire network modernisation process is a very logistic-intensive one and the problem of insecurity has seriously affected the pace of work in some parts of the country,” he added.

According to him, insecurity has compounded the problem in at least 13 states, lamenting that flooding has created additional logistic impediments such that the pace of the ongoing network modernisation efforts has slowed down.

Acknowledging the fact that the telco’s customers have been experiencing some disruption over the last few weeks, he thanked them for their patience. “We sincerely express our thanks to our customers for their patience. We sincerely appreciate the enthusiastic support which our engineering teams continue to receive from different communities in many parts of the country,” Goodluck said, adding that such support is often a much-needed tonic in the face of the enormous logistic-challenges the project regularly encounters. He pledged that MTN would stick to its original plan of carrying out the network procedures only at night, in order to minimise disruptions to services and assured that MTN is doing everything possible, including doubling its work teams, to complete the project as quickly as possible.

“MTN’s current network modernisation and swap-out exercise which began in July is expected to cover the entire country and was originally expected to span a period of nine months. Its objectives are to considerably enhance capacity on the MTN Network and improve service quality. Under the project, which is being implemented by a combined team of MTN engineers and technical partners that include Ericsson, Huawei and ZTE, key network components are being swapped with the latest upgrades in the industry. In addition, current power systems are being replaced with hybrid power systems which are more environment-friendly.

“It’s a massive investment we are making to boost not only the quality of telephone services, but also to enhance the back-end information and communication technology support which we provide for banking and financial services, the oil industry and several other industries across Nigeria,” he said.